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Sunday, December 3, 2017

Google Chrome Will Support HDR Video Playback In Future

If you talk about video quality and displays, you might have heard High Dynamic Range (HDR). What HDR does is, it improves the luminosity range and widens the color space, resulting in greater contrast and color accuracy. Android 7.0 Nougat came with official HDR playback support which enables a high color depth format and up to individual applications to support extracting HDR metadata from videos. But to experience all this, you need an compatible display of producing the wider color space.

There are many devices which supports HDR content but the issue now is the lack of HDR content available for viewing. Google Play Movies & TV, Netflix, and most recently YouTube support HDR playback on a handful of devices though their libraries are limited. It looks like Google Chrome for Android will soon join the list of applications that are capable of HDR video playback, however.Recently, there were two commits on the Chromium gerrit, Google Chrome for Android will be able to extract HDR metadata from the video container and pass it to the MediaCodec class. The HDR video, encoded in the VP9 Profile 2 (10 bit) video codec, can then be played back on a supported device.This improvement to Google Chrome will result in a higher quality video viewing experience in the future. Unfortunately since there’s such a limited number of HDR content available, most users won’t be able to appreciate the improvements that HDR brings for at least a few years. Furthermore, streaming HDR content naturally requires more bandwidth than non-HDR content due to the higher amount of data that is encoded, so data speeds may still be a limiting factor in many areas of the world.If you have a device capable of playing back HDR content as well as the Internet speed to match, check out this video on YouTube to get a taste of what HDR can bring to your video viewing experience.